Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Fuller in New York in 1844–1846

[63] d [Fuller in New York in 1844–1846] Horace Greeley Horace Greeley (1811–1872) went to New York in 1831 to make his living as a newspaperman, and by 1841 he had established the New-York Tribune. He married Mary Young Cheney (1811–1872) in 1836; of their seven children, only two lived to maturity. Greeley was one of the strongest supporters of the Transcendentalists, often reviewing and reprinting selections from their works in the Tribune. He invited Fuller to join the Tribune as a literary editor and reviewer, and between December 1844 and August 1846 she contributed 250 reviews, articles, and essays to the paper. In addition, Greeley copublished Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). When Fuller first came to New York, she lived with the Greeleys, making fast friends with their son Arthur (called “Pickie”). Initially, Fuller liked Greeley “much,” calling him “a man of the people, and outwardly unrefined,” but with “the refinement of true goodness, and a noble disposition” (or, as she later put it, in his habits he was “a slattern and plebeian,” in his heart “a nobleman”), and she concluded, “We have an excellent mutual understanding ” (29 December 1844, 9 March 1845, Letters, 3:256, 4:56). She found Greeley’s wife reclusive, often ill, and interested in too many causes; once, when she ran into Fuller on the street, she touched Fuller’s kid gloves, shuddered , and said, “Skin of a beast, skin of a beast!,” to which Fuller replied, touching Mrs. Greeley’s silk gloves, “Entrails of a worm!” (Brockway, Fifty Years, 157). Greeley himself was a workaholic who was rarely home, but Fuller stayed at what she called “Castle Doleful” for a year, during which time their continual disagreements about everything from feminism to food caused, in Greeley’s words, “a perceptible distance between us.” Also, he felt she was more his wife’s friend than his. Even though he thought her contributions to the Tribune excellent, he was frustrated, as a professional journalist who understood the necessity of meeting deadlines, that she could “write only when in the vein,” waiting for “the flow of inspiration.” Nevertheless, when Fuller went to Italy in 1848, it was Greeley who helped make it possible by hiring her as a correspondent of the Tribune. After Fuller’s death, he helped her brother edit and publish her writings. fuller in her own time [64] My first acquaintance with Margaret Fuller was made through the pages of “The Dial.” The lofty range and rare ability of that work, and its un-American richness of culture and ripeness of thought, naturally filled the ‘fit audience, though few,’ with a high estimate of those who were known as its conductors and principal writers. Yet I do not now remember that any article, which strongly impressed me, was recognized as from the pen of its female editor, prior to the appearance of “The Great Lawsuit,” afterwards matured into the volume more distinctively, yet not quite accurately, entitled “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.” I think this can hardly have failed to make a deep impression on the mind of every thoughtful reader, as the production of an original, vigorous, and earnest mind. “Summer on the Lakes,” which appeared some time after that essay, though before its expansion into a book, struck me as less ambitious in its aim, but more graceful and delicate in its execution; and as one of the clearest and most graphic delineations, ever given, of the Great Lakes, of the Prairies, and of the receding barbarism, and the rapidly advancing, but rude, repulsive semi-civilization, which were contending with most unequal forces for the possession of those rich lands. I still consider “Summer on the Lakes” unequalled , especially in its pictures of the Prairies and of the sunnier aspects of Pioneer life. Yet, it was the suggestion of Mrs. Greeley,—who had spent some weeks of successive seasons in or near Boston, and who had there made the personal acquaintance of Miss Fuller, and formed a very high estimate and warm attachment for her,—that induced me, in the autumn of 1844, to offer her terms, which were accepted, for her assistance in the literary department of the Tribune. A home in my family was included in the stipulation. I was myself barely acquainted with her, when she thus came to reside with us, and I did not fully appreciate her nobler qualities for some months afterward . Though we were members of the...